‘Mare of Easttown’ Series Finale Recap: And the Killer Is…

The greatest trick Mare of Easttown ever pulled is a montage. After the apparent, and I stress apparent, solving of the murder of Erin McMenamin, we catch up with a series of characters as music plays. Mare goes back to work at the station. Her friend Dawn, who appears to be in remission from her cancer, buys a house for her formerly missing daughter Katie and her granddaughter to live in. Erin’s best friend Jess takes one last look at a picture of the two of them together. Mare and her mother Helen take care of Drew, whose mother Carrie is back in rehab and has willingly relinquished custody. Lori—the wife of alleged murderer John, whose sexual relationship with his own relative Erin caused all of this—is left to care for his son with Erin, taking him for ear surgery that the baby’s original alleged father Dylan voluntarily reimburses her for. Outside of the montage, Siobhan decides to go to Berkeley for college, while Mare’s boyfriend Richard moves on to a new teaching gig elsewhere. Even Mare’s ex Frank and his briefly estranged fiancée Faye patch things up and get back together. Everything’s all tied up, until it isn’t.

The final whodunit plays out much like an episode of Law & Order, where it’s never the first guy they suspect and it’s usually not the second guy whom they take to trial either, but some third player previously seen as a bystander or even a victim. The ol’ triple-twist, in other words. No, Erin McMenamin’s killer was not her first cousin once removed* Billy Ross; the “confession” we saw last episode was really a rehearsal for taking the rap for a crime he didn’t commit. But nor is it his brother John Ross, who tries to kill Billy to complete the cover-up but can’t go through with it, turning the gun on himself until Billy and Mare wrest it away from him. John is Erin’s statutory rapist and the father of her child, yes, but he didn’t kill her any more than Billy did.

(*I want to note here that if I’d read my own reviews I’d have realized last week that John and Billy were Kenny McMenamin’s cousins, not his brothers, as apparently the exact relationship was mentioned in the second episode; that’s my bad, and I apologize. I do, however, feel that if the last-name situation was going to be as vital to the solution of the case as it wound up being, the nature of their relationship to each other could have been mentioned more than one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but your mileage may vary.)

As Mare finds out—through a chance revelation by Mr. Carroll, the elderly ex-cop whose wife died in that car accident a few episodes ago and with whom Mare’s mom Helen had a brief affair years ago—it was John’s son Ryan who pulled the trigger. Quite by accident, if he’s to be believed: He stole Mr. Carroll’s gun with the intention of scaring Erin away from his father, whom he knew to be having an affair with her, but wound up shooting her during a scuffle for control of the weapon. Ryan then told John, who enlisted Billy in moving the body and covering up the killing. The thinking behind Billy’s intended false confession—and John’s abortive attempt to shoot him himself, staging it to look like a suicide—is that of the three people involved, he had the least to lose by going to prison.

All of this, as you could probably imagine, plays out like one powerful emotional explosion after another. Boom—John’s life is over. Boom—his wife Lori, Mare’s best friend, is left raising her husband’s baby, a product of incest. Boom—Mare is disgusted by her life-long bestie’s attempt to cover up the crime by pinning the blame on Billy. Boom—Mare is so gutted by discovering that it was Ryan who killed Erin that she emits an involuntary whimper of pure oh, no–ness. Boom—Lori loses her son as well as her husband, and since Mare was responsible for both arrests, she loses Mare, too. Boom—after months pass, the two women reconcile, as Lori collapses into Mare’s arms on the floor of her kitchen, completely bottomed out.

So in the end, in its literal finale, Mare of Easttown finally put its best foot forward. Sure, the resolution of the mystery is a bit “twists and fake-outs for twists’ and fake-outs’ sake.” But each new revelation came with an emotionally devastating payload for the characters, with Winslet and Nicholson in particular doing their best work of the series. I’ll be seeing Winslet leaning motionless against the wall of her shower and hearing Nicholson scream about her character’s son—”It’s my Ryan! My Ryan!!“—for a long time to come. The loss she has experienced is almost beyond comprehension, grief compounded upon grief, betrayal upon betrayal. Minor subplots like the prowler situation at the Carrolls’ house suddenly swung back around to become vital to the story’s conclusion, in much the same way that the junkie-brother-of-a-friend angle paid off with the discovery of his telltale castoff clothing in the previous episode. They don’t all live happily ever after of course, but they live on at least, learning, as Mare put it to Mr. Carroll, to “live with the unacceptable.”

Mare of Easttown may ultimately go down in history, for me anyway, as “the one where Kate Winslet did a Philly accent,” the same way that a previous prestige-procedural like the acclaimed The Night Of is “the one where John Turturro puts ointment on his feet.” Deliberately de-glamorizing character bits like those will do that sometimes. (Her work has been excellent throughout regardless.) There are some weird lacunae in this episode, too—like, couldn’t it have found the time to catch up with Kenny, the father of the slain girl, to see how he took the news about the identities of Erin’s abuser and killer? What kind of teenager has a physical hard copy of an incriminating photo in the year of our digital Lord 2021? Did Mare really “need” to arrest Ryan, or was this grim bit of symmetry—having lost her son, she now takes away her best friend’s—unnecessary and cruel, just as Lori said, with the show counting on our faith in the institution of policing to carry the weight? And the final shot of Mare going up the attic stairs to confront her grief over her late son Kevin looked a bit more Hereditary-style spooky than it was probably supposed to; one last not-quite-right move from a show that made plenty of them.

That’s a lot of caveats, I know. But in this episode, at least, the series left me feeling moved, rather than ripped off. Folks, I’ll take it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Mare of Easttown Episode 7 ("Sacrament") on HBO Max

Watch Mare of Easttown Episode 7 ("Sacrament") on HBO Now